Danger Close

5. Just Another Day in Afghanistan

Usually, the major battles get all the attention. But for the average soldier, sailor, airman, or marine any day can bring moments where one is walking the narrow line between life and death. Politicians and the media may not call it war, but for the guy getting shot at it sure feels like war. This has been the case with Afghanistan since the major combat ended; after the fall of the Taliban regime, in between headline-grabbing operations like Anaconda and Tora Bora, the U.S. military, along with its coalition partners, settled into the task of stabilizing the new Afghan government and hunting down extremists who sought to either bring down the new regime or lash out at the West. This was the real dirty work, and much of it fell to SOF and Rangers forces. Every day has been a harrowing grind of security details, reconnaissance patrols, intelligence gathering, attempts to grab high-value persons, and a host of other duties, any one of which could, with very little notice, find a small team confronted with a very nasty situation beyond the scope of its organic firepower. For this reason, TACPs, both SOF and conventional, have continued as a mainstay with forces working in that theater. Most of the time the TACP is just another member of the team, which means he could be kicking down doors and clearing rooms, or helping the medic treat illnesses and injuries in a village . Sometimes, though, he gets called on to employ his primary training , and having that level of CAS control expertise on hand at a moment’s notice can save the day. One particularly intense example of TACPs unexpectedly coming in handy occurred near the town of Khowst as Operation Anaconda was winding down. S.Sgt. Brian Wilchenski had been a conventional TACP with the th ASOS before  September, and when they couldn’t find enough SOF TACPs to meet the needs of the SOF ramp-up for Afghanistan , Wilchenski volunteered to go through the crash course to become an augmentee. Wilchenski was accepted, trained, and deployed to Afghanistan around mid-December . He worked at TF Dagger headquarters for awhile, and finally joined a SOF team in early February. 5. Just Another Day in Afghanistan 88 Danger Close While with this team he pretty much ran the gamut of SOF duties. Most of it was quite routine, even boring, but Wilchenski was looking back on it as one of the most rewarding experiences of his career. His tour was nearly over when, as often happens, he had his closest brush with death. This was right around the third week in March at the tail end of Anaconda . We all went to sleep [on our] third or fourth night back in Khowst. . . . About midnight all of a sudden things start exploding. We had mortar rounds and automatic weapons fire coming in from four different directions. . . . As I’m heading out of the building, frickin’ tracer rounds start bouncing off the wall right in front of me. . . . My body armor and helmet were already turned in and locked up ’cause I was going to leave in a couple of days. [Amazingly, this is standard practice—two or three days before troops redeploy home they turn in all their equipment, including protective gear, which then gets packed up and sent to the shipping terminal.] As I get up on top of the roof . . . I hear a snap, snap. There’s different sounds you hear when you’re in battle. A zing is, you know, it’s close, it could be a couple yards away. A snap is a near miss. You heard a round snap, what it’s doing is breaking the sound barrier over your head and it’s usually only a couple of inches away. A round snaps here and a round snaps there and I’m like, “Oh damn!” I got no helmet and no body armor on and I lay on my back,“Oh, this sucks!” I get on the radio and I just happen to say, you know, it’s like calling God, “Hey, is there anybody out there?” and all of a sudden an aircraft checks in and he says,“Yep I’m here.”And it was just a big,“Phew, yeah!”He goes,“I’m a B-1B, and I got . . .”I’m like,“Oh man, let me guess, you got like twenty-seven Mk-82s and eighteen JDAMs.” “Yep, that’s what I got...